"As a woman I have no country.... As a woman my country is the whole world." -Virgina Woolf

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Living in the Gaps

Since we’ve lived here in our little town, people have occasionally mistaken me—as an obvious forgeiner—for a volunteer at nearby permaculture farm. Once I’ve cleared that up, I’m usually treated to a comment of some degree of snarkiness about the project. The most recent one: “I hear they’re charging in euros, now. [Disgusted snort.]”

So I was curious about just what was going on at this experiment in sustainable living that has generated such—maybe not antipathy, but certainly annoyance—in its immediate neighbors. Last week I busted out my somewhat half-assed journalistic credentials and scheduled an interview. A malodorous but very polite Spanish volunteer showed me around.

I have two degrees in environmental studies; in theory I agreed with everything Spanish dude had to say, and there’s no denying that this farm is a beautiful place. But, yes, I found myself getting more and more annoyed with my host as the morning progressed.

For one: he danced around all the hard questions—like, how sustainable can this place be if it has no ties to the surrounding community? Like, how do you justify traveling halfway across the world in order to be ecological? Like, if you’re telling me that money is evil and we should do away with it, why are you selling organic veggies to fancy Oaxaca City restaurants…for money?

I know they’re hard questions, and he could easily have thrown some of them back at me, and I wouldn’t have had answers for him. But he didn’t even seem to consider them hard questions; he was treading around in the Land of The Best You Can Do with his eyes on Mount Ideal, refusing to recognize that he is nowhere near the summit.

So that was part of it: the smugness, the I-don’t-debase-my-body-with-chemical-deodorants, I-don’t-touch-money-on-a-daily-basis, I-work-the-LAND attitude, when, hello, you FLEW here on a PLANE with a ticket that you purchased with money, and someone at some point had some money on them when they purchased this huge piece of land and build all these gorgeous ecological houses and meeting halls.

As for my neighbors, I think the money question is part of their beef with these guys: when you’re struggling to make ends meet, there’s nothing more annoying than people who have more money than you ever will going around talking about how money is evil.

And lots of elements of the project looked familiar to me—because I’ve seen them in my neighbors’ yards. They just don’t call it permaculture—it’s just common sense to reuse bald tires if you have some lying around and you need to make a retaining wall or an outdoor staircase, to use cracked water bottles as planters, to have a composting toilet when there’s no sewer system to connect to, to raise a few laying hens on your kitchen scraps, to collect rainwater.

So that’s sort of annoying too: to have someone come in from outside, start doing the things you’ve always been doing, but turn it into a tourist attraction and profitable business (but money is evil) while you get by as best as you can, and at the same time tell you that you’re farming WRONG, on the plot of land your family has been farming for generations.

So I keep thinking about the gaps: the gap between the Ideal and The Best You Can Do; the gap between the permaculturists and the neighbors. It seems like that’s where we’re living right now, in the gaps. The other day I was driving around Oaxaca after working my day job (more about THAT later), looking for a parking space so I could return my library books before picking Ibis up from HIS day job, and wishing I were in my garden…and thinking about just how far we are from the ideal, but also how necessary what we’re doing right now is—namely, earning some of that evil stuff so we can exchange it for necessary goods and services.

And thinking about our ideal, which falls somewhere in the gap between the neighbors (who for all their recycled tires, have disturbingly few qualms about dumping poisons on bugs and rodents of all kinds), and the permaculturists (who for all their beautiful eco-design, are kind of elitist and insufferable).

When I told Ibis all this, about gaps, something metaphorical got lost in the translation to Spanish, so I put it to him like this: we’re down here in the valley, and the ideal is up there (here I pointed out the window to the mountains). And to get to the mountain maybe we have to cross a river. And maybe we’re not really all that interested in boating, in and of itself, but we have to concentrate on what we’re doing, where we really are, or we could capsize. When we get to the other side, the mountain will still be there.